Dialectical Thinking & Moral Positions (Jameson)

In Postmoderism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric
Jameson proposes an ideal of intellectual practice by distinguishing between
thinking dialectically and merely taking moral positions. Jameson writes:

The distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in Hegel's
differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moralizing (Moralitfit)
from that whole very different realm of collective social values and practices
(Sittlichkeit). But it finds its definitive form in Marx's demonstration
of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those classic pages of the
Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical
way to think historical development and change. The topic of the lesson
is, of course, the historical development of capitalism itself and the
deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage Marx
powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development
positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type
of thinking that would be capable of as in the demonstrably baleful features
of capitalism along with its ordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously
within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either
judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible
to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing
that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from
this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of
taking moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency
of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the
cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and
progress all together. (47)